Private Violence

By KURT ANDERSEN

The unspeakable crimes are being yanked out of the shadows What might be called public violence is as American as assassinations, mob wars and mass murders, the stuff of screaming headlines and periodic national soul searching. What might be called private violence, what people who know each other, even profess to love each other, do to each other, is a nightmarish realm only beginning to be forthrightly explored. Its particular horror stems from its viola tions of the trust upon which all intimate human relations depend: it is cruelty exercised on those nearest, most vulnerable, least able or inclined to defend themselves from their attackers. For those who commit private violence, who abuse children, beat wives and rape, the usual reasons behind public violence--greed, dementia, vengeance, feral antisocial anger--do not generally apply. How to explain acts of brutality so personal and thus so specially disturbing?

Public violence, at least, can be neatly tallied. The FBI is aware of exactly 22,516 murders committed in the U.S. in 1981, a fifth of them killings of loved ones, and that is very close to the true total. Even the Government accounting of motor-vehicle thefts, 1,073,998 for 1981, is almost right, since victims cannot get their insurance money unless they file a police report. But when statisticians turn to private violence, the numbers become iffy, approximate in the extreme. Are there 650,000 cases of child abuse annually, or a million? Or 6 million? Bona fide experts, extrapolating and just guessing, variously cite all those figures and others. It is said that every year 2 million women are beaten by their husbands, and it is also said that nearly 6 million are. Pick your figure. A Justice Department survey counted 178,000 rapes during 1981, but for every woman who reported a rape to the police, perhaps nine or maybe 25 did not. It is beyond dispute, however, that extraordinary numbers of women and children are being brutalized by those closest to them.

The uncertainty about the scope of private violence is a function of shame, of hushing up. Such crimes, unlike slashings or shootings on sidewalks and in taverns, often leave a victim more hurt and humiliated than outraged. Historically, beatings by one's husband, like rapes, were bad enough to suffer but more shameful still to reveal publicly. Child-rearing, no matter how harshly executed, was an entirely private matter.

Today, the dirty secrets are no longer being kept. Victims of private violence are talking--to police, prosecutors, counselors, friends, one another--and U.S. society is trying to help. Private violence is becoming less private. Thus, while reports of child abuse in Florida, for example, rose from 35,301 in 1981 to 45,704 last year, such apparent increases may be due mostly to authorities' finding out about more of the violence. Betty Friedan, the feminist author, believes that attacks on women are not necessarily on the rise, just coming out of the shameful murk: "Women don't tolerate it any more because they know it's all right to speak up."

Rape and family violence and incest are still uncomfortable subjects. And the common good is hardly better served by easy statutory fiats--one spouse slapping another is not just like any other criminal assault--than by the old silence of misplaced propriety. But the unspeakable must be spoken, in all of its repellent conjugations. Take, for example, the biggest taboo: "As long as incest has that secrecy," says Miriam Ingebritson, a Minneapolis therapist, "it has a potency and power it doesn't deserve. It has to be stripped of that power." There are now all kinds of places to turn to. Rape treatment clinics, shelters for battered wives, and centers for abused children have sprung up across the country. Legal procedures appear to have made prosecution easier. The problems are coming out of the closet in surprising places: in the small Plains city of Salina (pop. 42,600), the Domestic Violence Association of Central Kansas gets around 100 "crisis calls" a month.

There is no place so violent as home. About half of all rapes occur there. It is in the privacy of the home, both in cramped flats and in grand neocolonials, that women are pummeled by husbands and boyfriends. It was in his home in Houston a few years ago, for instance, that Second-Grader Daniel Brownell, whose stepfather's attacks had left him paralyzed and permanently senseless, was found branded with cigarette burns that spelled I CRY. One remarkable Connecticut woman named Carol,* 38, who is a volunteer counselor of imprisoned rapists, knows freakishly well that home is not necessarily a haven: it was in her childhood home in the early 1950s that she was the victim of incest, at a friend's home that a half-dozen men gang-raped her, in her very own home that her second husband beat the living daylights out of her again and again.

Out on the street, at least, one's guard is up. Muggers who demand money are, in a sense, just conducting a cutthroat business. Most of the time they do not lay claims on their victims' humanity. Home is meant to be life's one warm, safe place. Violence committed there, especially by somebody understood to be a guardian (husband, father, mother, uncle, babysitter), is a special betrayal. And once brawling becomes routine in a household, or primal taboos are cracked, there is often no stopping the spread of viciousness. Richard Gelles, a sociologist at the University of Rhode Island, describes the grim ecology of a violent family: "The husband will beat the wife. The wife may then learn to beat the children. The bigger siblings learn it's O.K. to hit the little ones, and the family pet may be the ultimate recipient of violence."

The thousands of wife beaters who happen to be in prison (almost all are there for some other, less peculiar crime) regard rapists with contempt, and rapists in turn call the cellblocks' child abusers scum. But in fact the three groups have some rough affinities. The privately violent are often alcoholic or drug-dependent. All three species tend to have low opinions of themselves; they get violent, psychoanalysts say, because it gives them a cheap squirt of power. Like most criminals, they are immature and impulsive. Everything they want they want instantly. And they are uncommonly isolated people, often virtually friendless, cut off from those who lead richer, happier or just plain calmer lives.

The worst thing about family violence is its natural reproduction of itself, like a poisonous plant sending out spores. Most rapists were preyed upon sexually as children, and most violent criminals were raised in violent homes. Children of punched-out women, accustomed to seeing family business transacted with fists, are prone to become battered wives and battering husbands themselves. Worse, battered children grow up predisposed to batter their own offspring. Sexually abused boys often become pedophiles and rapists, while sexually victimized girls, perennial targets, are likelier to become battered wives. Bruce Ritter, a Roman Catholic priest, runs a shelter for teen-age runaways and castoffs in the neon squalor of Manhattan's Times Square. "The girls who walk in off the streets with babies abuse them," Father Ritter says. "If a two-week-old baby is crying, the mother will slap the baby. We try to teach her not to do that."

Yet there are important distinctions between and within the three main genres of private violence. Slapping a spouse is different from shaking a child--an adult can more easily understand, fight back or flee--and both are very unlike rape. Of the three, rape is most unequivocally a statutory crime, and probably every rapist ought to be locked up for some time. They are real criminals. Of course, a parent who willfully scalds a child's arm is a criminal. Of course, a man who stomps his pregnant wife is a criminal. These cases are, ironically, the easiest ones to think about: when the violence is so ugly and utterly inexcusable, you just throw the book at the sick bastards.

But most cases of private violence are closer calls. What to do about a man who rapes his wife? What about the fights between spouses that are not pat, villain-and-victim episodes? What about Barrel Trueblood of Terre Haute, Ind., whose son Travis was taken from him for three months in 1980 because the father had punished with the thwack of a ruler? Greg Dixon, a Baptist minister and head of Indiana's Moral Majority, says Trueblood was "just giving a normal whipping." Says he: "Reasonable people can detect whether it's assault and battery or not."

One problem is that reasonable, well-intentioned people disagree. How should outsiders decide when private violence is a matter for direct public intervention?

Some liberals sound illiberally willing to cut corners when it comes to prosecuting private-violence offenders. In some cities, a man who assaults a woman must be arrested and prosecuted, even if she changes her mind about the whole thing; in Anchorage, Alaska, a woman who declines to testify against her husband may be fined or jailed. It used to be much more difficult to convict rapists, but states are changing their laws so that simply a victim's say-so may be evidence enough. The Washington State legislature, angry over the difficulty of prosecuting a child molester, passed a law last year allowing hearsay testimony in certain criminal trials to corroborate other evidence.

The new zealousness, coming after generations of apathy, is not surprising. It is no wonder that counselors of battered women are inclined to advise a black-and-blue wife to file for divorce and prosecute the brute instead of going back to him for the third time. When a nuclear family is undergoing a meltdown, about to blow, it is a good idea to evacuate the place. But sometimes the professionals seem eager to denigrate their clients' commitment to marriage. "Women have an incredible amount of hope," says Mary Marecek, a counselor at the oldest women's shelter in Massachusetts. "We want them to get over the hope that the ideal marriage may still come out of it." Yet a hopeful woman, trying to make a go of a not-so-good marriage, is not always a fooL There are those in the field who--like the Ellen Jamesians, the self-mutilating feminists of The World According to Garp--seem too quick to find in wife abuse a confirmation and dramatization of sexism, a bloody cartoon of male oppression.

There are more specialized kinds of private violence, of course, only just beginning to be classified as "social problems." Most prominent is "granny bashing," the flip British nickname for the physical mistreatment of old people, usually the victimizers' parents or grandparents. About 5% of dependent elderly Americans may be abused, according to Murray Straus, a University of New Hampshire sociologist. Is a surge of parent bashing possible? It would not be a real surprise: futuristic cabin fever could break out if, on the verge of the 21 st century, millions of Americans really are working and living in their hermetic "electronic cottages." Last year in state-of-the-art and otherwise pacific Japan, there were 1,099 reported cases of children assaulting their parents.

In most of the rest of the world, private violence is not considered a high-priority social problem. Not that punch-ups at home are any less prevalent. Rather, as a Thai social worker says, "it's so common that no one thinks it's a problem." If anything, victims abroad are more explicitly shamed into silence, with the legal and medical systems often oblivious. In most countries a man's home is practically his personal free-fire zone, off limits to busybodies. And the U.S. has far and away more shelters and programs where victims can find solace and help. But the vast array of American services is to meet a vast terror: a woman's chances of being raped in the U.S., for instance, are five or ten times as great as in Western Europe.

The U.S. cannot afford to get smug. Not all American victims are getting help, or even sympathy. "As a society," says Sociologist Gelles of private violence, "we laugh at this behavior." We should not. But indeed, such behavior is not so completely unthinkable that decent folks do not chuckle when Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden angrily threatens to sock his ever-loving wife. "I'm gonna send you to the moon," he barks on The Honeymooners, his clenched fist waving. "To the moon, Alice." But if people on the one hand laugh off private violence, they become raving, sputtering mad about it too. "The pendulum swings to two extremes," says A. Nicholas Groth, a Connecticut prison psychologist. "Either people blame the victim, or see the offender as a fiend who ought to be castrated." As the analyses of private violence on the following pages show, the hard duty is to look straight at the problems and, neither laughing nor ranting, figure out what reasonable people can do. --By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Barbara B. Dolan/Minneapolis, with other bureaus

*Those referred to by only their first names in the cover stories have been given pseudonyms at their request.

With reporting by Barbara B. Dolan This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.